Electoral falsifications may play crucial role in dead-heat election
Problems with electoral law can lead to nearly a million Ukrainians losing the right to vote and have created additional opportunities for falsification in the Sept. 30 vote for parliamentary seats, analysts said.
The new electoral provisions are designed to prevent the millions of falsified votes that sparked mass protests in a 2004 presidential contest dubbed the Orange Revolution. In the second round of the presidential race in 2004, 2.8 million ballots were rigged, according to the Committee of Voters of Ukraine.
But the changes may see parties lose – or steal – crucial points in a tight race between the three front-runners: Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko’s Byut bloc, and Our Ukraine-Peoples’ Self-Defense, which is loyal to President Viktor Yushchenko.
“This is a battle for 300,000 to 400,000 votes that will determine who will win enough of the few seats required to form the majority in the next parliament,” said elections administration expert and former Member of Parliament Volodymyr Kovtunets.
Sociologists showed between three and seven parties, including the Communists crossing the three percent qualifying barrier for seats in parliament. More than ten percent of voters were undecided in early September before a publication ban on poll results came into effect last week.
A million votes represent approximately four percent in the final tally. With the so-called Orange (BYuT and OUPSD) and Blue coalition (Regions) forces in a dead heat, the “golden share” of seats will determine who will make or break a coalition in the next Rada. Polls show that several political camps have a chance of landing the kingmaker position, namely OUPSD, the bloc of former parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, and the Communist party.
85 percent suspicious
In its weekly election monitoring report, the CVU election watchdog expressed concern about “the declarations by politicians and sociologists concerning very high voter turnout in separate regions. According to CVU estimates, the voter turnout will be between 60 to 70 percent.”
Ballot stuffing and multiple voting by certain voters is a concern.
“If voter turnout at separate polling stations will be higher than 85 percent then the CVU will conduct a factual verification of voters concerning the reality of their voting.”
Falsification versus Disenfranchisement
Certain categories of citizens will not be able to cast their ballots due to changes in electoral law. These include elderly and disabled people who are immobile and live in distant villages. Voters entering the country after Sept. 27 will not be able to cast their ballot; students and migrant workers who are not at home on Election Day will not be able to vote.
CVU spokesperson Oleksandr Chernenko said that these measures, together with mistakes in voter lists, can result in 1.5 million voters losing the right to vote on Election Day.
Voting at home
On Sept. 30 at least 102,000 of more than 450,000 polling station commissioners will leave the premises of their stations to conduct what is known as mobile-voting or voting-at-home – a major source of alleged electoral falsification in the 2004 presidential race. The commissioners will get into a car with mini ballot boxes to collect the votes of immobile persons who are bound to their homes due to age or illness.
Mobile-voting – as high as thirty percent at polling stations in Mykolayiv and Donetsk regions during the fraud-ridden presidential elections in 2004 – is potentially a major source of falsification, according to Kovtunets.
“The decisions on who votes at home are ultimately made at the polling station level,” Kovtunets explained. “If we see that more than three percent of total votes at urban polling stations were cast ‘at home’ that will give us reason to be suspect.”
He said that up to 30 percent of elderly people unable to move from their homes in the country’s distant villages will not be able to vote on Sept. 30 if the mobile voting groups do not visit them.
Kovtunets said that the race for the Rada is so close that false votes can decide the balance: “You have more than 33,000 polling stations – ten false ‘votes-at-home’ or ten ballots stuffed in the ballot box at each station – nobody will detect falsification,” Kovtunets said, adding that all parties are responsible for electoral funny-business to varying degrees.
“CVU observers have found an abnormally high number of voters who want to vote at home in certain regions. Although these incidents are few, they show that falsifications are being prepared.
In Kharkiv region the CVU found that the number of Ukrainians requesting voting at home is between 2 to 3 percent, while in two districts of the regions that number reaches 10 percent.
“A large number of ‘dead souls’ were found in the voter lists for the city of Lozova [in Kharkiv region],” according to the report, “this confirms information that the city’s government is preparing a technology to vote for these ‘voters.’”
In the last elections, more than 1.1 million voters applied to cast their ballots at home. After voting was done more than 950,000 had voted from their place of residence – nearly 4 percent of the total final vote tally.
Voters returning home
The Ministry of Internal Affairs performed a pre-election sweep of homes to verify residency records. Local police officers randomly checked 890,000 apartments from June to August of this year, the ministry’s press service reported on Sept 17. Police registered or removed residential records for 402,000 citizens while 69,000 were determined to be living abroad. Nearly 95,000 people were found to not be living at their registered place of residence. Nearly 26,000 were charged for breaking administrative law.
The Regions’ press service picked up the information from the police ministry – run by Socialist Vasyl Tsushko – and said that there were 3.32 million Ukrainian passport holders located outside of the country in mid-August. The blue party’s spin doctors said that 1.16 million of the Ukrainians abroad (around 35 percent) come from four of the country’s westernmost regions – the heartland of orange electoral support.
The Regions accused the president-appointed heads of regional administrations of beefing up the voter numbers in the “traditionally-orange oblasts” of Lviv and Sumy.
“These facts are proof of the purposeful use of the administrative resource by the president aimed at creating the condition for falsifying voting results,” the statement alerts election observers.
On Sept. 27, the state border service should provide the Central Election Commission with passport numbers of registered holders who are outside of the country. These passport holders will be stricken from the voter lists.
“There is a potential problem with voters arriving in Ukraine in the last week before elections. Up to 400,000 votes could be lost if we consider that 75,000 Ukrainians enter the country on a daily basis,” calculated Kovtunets.
The Constitutional Court began hearings on the border-crossing voter provisions on Sept. 18.
Voters not at home
One source of multiple voting by a single person in the past has been eliminated for these elections, namely absentee ballots. CVU’s Chernenko estimated that abuse of the absentee certificates resulted in a half million votes stolen in 2004. In the March 2006 elections, only 20,000 absentee voting certificates were issued due to stricter controls, and the certificates have been completely eliminated for these elections.
Kovtunets estimated that nearly half a million voters will be disenfranchised due to the innovation, including students and domestic migrant workers. Domestic migration stood at nearly 343,000 persons in the first seven months of this year, according to the State Statistics Committee.
Voting abroad
More than 420,000 Ukrainians will be eligible to vote at polling stations outside of the country, the CVU reported on Sept. 17. The NGO said that the Foreign Ministry has included nearly a half million Ukrainians in the voter lists for foreign voting stations. But CVU head Ihor Popov told Deutsche Welle radio that no more than 10 percent of that number will actually cast their ballots on Sept. 3. Popov said that no political party or bloc is “seriously concerned” about voter abroad, because of the expected low voter turn out. On Sept 30 polling stations will be open at 115 polling stations in 79 countries, according to the CEC.
